The above-identified related applications are directed to various concepts in which media, such as photographs, text, video, etc. created on one device are made available to or sent as copies to pre-selected devices, programs, internet services, and/or accounts. In certain embodiments, the photos are captured via a plurality of methods, for example, digital cameras, USB video cameras, scanners, mobile communicating devices (cell phone, etc.), and web browsers, and presented to a home PC as new files created on a fixed disk drive, or via portable media such as an SD card or USB thumb drive. In one embodiment, the invention residing on the home PC automatically detects new photos and videos and automatically processes, makes available, or copies each media item to a particular set of destinations as pre-established by the user. The destinations could be, for example, email addresses, folders on a home computer, third party software programs on the PC which accept media items as input, and third party online services requiring user credentials, such as Photobucket, Flicker, MySpace, Facebook, etc.
Media can be obtained by a device in many ways. The media can arrive as an attachment to, or contained in, an email, or in a text message, or it can be downloaded from a video camera, or from a web site, a social network, or the like. Thus, a user may receive media of various types from various sources using various delivery mechanisms. Some of the delivery mechanisms operate such that the user may not even be aware that media has arrived. This then presents a problem for the user to keep track of the media movement such that it is stored where it should be stored and delivered to whomever or wherever it should be delivered, and accessible in the contexts that it should be accessible in. It thus follows that the more active a user is with respect to incoming media the more difficult it is to keep the media properly organized.
An example of this difficulty is when a user receives media, such as photographs, from a friend or from a media memory, and the user desires to simply store those photographs on his/her home PC and share them with a few friends and colleagues. The typical procedure for this task is to insert the memory card into a card reader connected to the PC, choose a program to launch (such as the Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard) to aid in transferring the media, name the group of photos found, choose a destination folder on the hard drive, wait while each media file is copied in turn, and then finally choose whether or not to delete the original copies of the media files from the card. This is then followed by the user opening up the new folder containing the copied images using a program to view each photo in turn, and rotating one at a time any photos which are oriented incorrectly. Then the user launches a browser, navigates to an online service such as Photobucket or Facebook, enters their user name and password, navigates to the photo area within the online service, and creates a new album for the new photos. Finally, an uploader program is run from the web site, and the media is all uploaded while the user again waits for completion. The last step is to notify friends and family of the new photos, often by sending an email message to the desired people containing a link to the website which now stores the new photos. For this type of task, it is not at all uncommon to spend a full hour or more on the process, and based on the time and energy required, users tend to view the transfer and sharing of their photos as an unpleasant chore and postpone it as long as possible.
In some situations the user may desire to do more than simply store the media at a single location. For example, photos incoming to the user perhaps from a camera memory, or from a social network connection, may need to be stored on the user's PC as well as sent to a family member and perhaps concurrently to a web site (Facebook, Flicker, MySpace, etc.) for storage or further display. A more advanced internet user who has a group of friends on MySpace, a different group on Facebook, some good business colleagues on LinkedIn, and grandparents who are reluctant to create online accounts at various websites, may have to go through the full sequence explained previously and then repeat some or all of the upload and notification tasks several times before they are finished. Currently, there is no system that allows a user to receive media and distribute the received media concurrently to a number of diverse locations without some intervention on the part of the user for each destination and on a media by media basis.
Compounding the problem is the technical limitation that various locations have particular requirements for the media content itself and perhaps particular requirements for the transportation protocol. On top of that, many locations, such as web sites, have their own specific login and identification requirements. Even remembering multiple passwords for multiple sites is difficult for users. Thus, several problems exist when a user attempts to send media to multiple locations, and there's no good way to easily, efficiently, or simultaneously allow access to media or copy media in full to multiple locations with different requirements.
Another limitation for active internet users is one of access to media from within various digital contexts. Over a period of years, it's very common for users to switch between primary online photo and video album web sites and change their primary social networks. This results in a patchwork situation in which all the user's media items created over a period of several years have become partially available across each of multiple online web sites, and no single site or digital tool serves as a full repository of viewing, editing, managing, and sharing these media items. For example, when the user is viewing their photos in an album at www.kodakgallery.com, they may be looking to order prints or create gift items, such as calendars, for friends or family members. But it's often the case that the user will have only some of the media they're interested available on the Kodak site, and the user must then go through a process of searching other repositories, and downloading and/or uploading media files they're interested in to the Kodak site to finish construction of the gifts or get the full set of prints.